In this course, featuring many researchers from the University of Zurich and international institutions, we will introduce you to some of the most vibrant cultural trends addressing landscape appreciation, degradation, protection, and rehabilitation that currently circulate in the Asian hemisphere. You will learn about concepts of landscape in Asian religions, philosophy, social sciences, history and the arts and their reverberation in selected environmental projects in China, India and Japan. Furthermore, we will discuss how they are critically reflected upon in the context of the environmental humanities, and observe how an interdisciplinary approach towards regional ecosystems past and present reaches out beyond pragmatic technological solutions to mitigate environmental damage. Following us on our different paths and trajectories through the five modules of the course, you will encounter many of the reasons why environmental humanities study projects which strive to change people’s prevalent attitudes, values and behavioural patterns in order to redeem the rapidly globalizing crisis, and how they go about it.
Having acquainted yourself with the stories Asia’s landscapes – and landscape representations – tell about actual and possible human-nature relationships, you can compare and evaluate their potential to bring about the desired change and define your own range of actions as an informed stakeholder for creating a sustainable future. What is arguably no less intriguing: you will learn how to appreciate a broad range of eco-aesthetic forms that re-enchant our lives by creatively interacting with the more-than-human world.
You can follow the five modules of the course consecutively or just study the modules that interest you the most. If you want to earn a certificate, you need to complete all of the modules including the quizzes at the end of each module.
THESE ARE THE TOPICS OF THE 5 MODULES OF THIS COURSE:
Module 1: Concepts of landscape past and present and their cosmological underpinnings.
Module 2: Entangled landscapes comprising cultural flows of concepts and forms, contemporary gardens on the move, nostalgic elegies of demolished sites and rural reconstruction projects.
Module 3: Discussion of two religious communities in India (the Parsi-Zoroastrians and the Auroville community) and their relationship with the environment.
Module 4: Environmental debates tackling religious concepts and social practices and the problem of waste disposal in India.
Module 5: Environmental movements and the impact of Fukushima on attitudes towards nuclear energy in Japan, creative activism including arts projects and documentaries to protest against pollution and landscape degradation and raise environmental awareness in the Sinosphere, and emergent concepts for sustainable community life on the planet.

Having assessed China’s ancient and modern conceptions of landscapes, and how they moved between cultures, social groups and societies, we will turn to the concept of entangled landscapes in the second module. Here, we will evaluate representations and narratives that explore the agency, conundrums and possibilities of applied transcultural aesthetic (and functional) paradigms in national politics of garden and park design. In a first step, the traveling concept of the Chinese garden will help us to evaluate the cultural and geopolitical affordances of gardens between Asia and Europe that are very often intimately connected to utopian visions of the ideal community. Next, we will encounter two different examples of a Chinese garden that bespeak their original sociopolitical functionality and conceptual underpinnings as much as the changes of these same when travelling across time and space. Our third theme of hometown nostalgia will study the turn of artists and intellectuals towards imaginary gardens of the past in view of large-scale heritage demolition in China. Finally, we will probe into the history of rural reconstruction and encounter two successful approaches towards the re-/creation of sustainable landscapes.

講師

Andrea Riemenschnitter

字幕

In this video, the widespread demolition in China will be discussed with respect to its cultural reverberation. Many artists were affected by, and made the comments on the destruction of one of the country’s most beautiful landscapes in the wake of the Three Gorges Dam construction. The project drowned most of the scenery with its rich cultural heritage along the Yangtze River. At this same vein, the dam construction further spurred the extinction of the baiji or Yangtze River dolphin and other rare species that had been unique to the place. In reaction to the cultural and environmental damage, a number of highly acclaimed film and art works raised profound doubts regarding the project, and expressed their grief in view of the desolate scenery. Similar to the concerns of video installation artist Chen Qiulin, whose work we have met in another video, internationally renowned feature film director Jia Zhangke released his eye opening response, “Still Life” in 2006. It reflects the decline of the region from idyllic pastoral landscapes, ancient architectural landmarks and historical towns to become a desolate post-developmental wasteland. Having become a key symbol in contemporary creative works featuring hyper-urbanization, ruins frequently reach out beyond the scope of the actual occurrence, symbolizing civilizational decline at large. Intellectuals raised their voices within and outside the realm of the arts, in media essays or blogs, to caution that culture and the natural environment vanish together when building new infrastructure becomes an end in itself. Beijing-based novelist Yan Lianke had bought a traditional courtyard house in 2008, renovated it carefully, and only a year later watched helplessly when it was torn down by investors. Along with professionals from Beijing Cultural Heritage Protection Center, he appealed and sued and lost his case. Then, he wrote an open letter to President Hu Jintao, to which he never received an answer. He is not alone in warning about a crisis of Chinese civilization, when all material traces of the past are relentlessly destroyed. The Chinese word for demolition is “chai”. Once a building has been marked for demolition with this character, there is nearly no way for the owners to protect their homes, nor can concerned citizens safeguard the country’s perishing cultural heritage. Witty graffiti artists created a pun based on this character, Chai-na. The character chai sounds like the first syllable of the English name of the Chinese nation, whereas the second character used for the phonetic English transcription twists the foreign name of the nation into a local question. Literally re-translated into Chinese, the characters ask: where shall we demolish (next)? Ai Weiwei, world famous artist and enfant terrible of the modern Chinese art scene, has produced several series of photographs and artworks criticizing China’s demolition and building frenzy. He composed a sequence of pictures of construction sites, showing several buildings from a perspective that exposes the bleak soullessness. Contrasting the still visible allure and homeliness of a pre-modern neighborhood with the cold arrogance of an emerging skyline in his work “Provisional Landscapes”, he also captured the departure of plants and other forms of nonhuman life from the new cities. His contribution to the 12th Kassel documenta in 2007 was both an homage to the ephemeral beauty of ancient handicraft and an elegy for China’s cultural particularity. Ai collected huge quantities of old wooden doors from the Ming and Qing dynasties from the debris of demolished buildings and arranged them into a fragile monument. Shortly after its installation, the monument was knocked over by a thunderstorm. Leaving the collapsed piece of art on the show was a strong reminder of the natural forces that we humans had set out to control. In the wake of climate change they seem to retaliate human arrogance with increasingly disastrous effects. Ironically confronting the modern regime’s infatuation with numbers, Kunming-based poet Yu Jian composed the poem “Scientific Demolition Statistics”. His poem records the damage wrought on a redeveloped place by investors who usually calculate their profit in figures without wasting a single thought on the fees that others pay for what is lost. The poem enigmatically ends with a vague reference to the old calendrical system. Demolition volume: eastward 1200 meters, westward 1400 meters. Sum total 168,000 square meters. This in concrete detail equals villages 2, temples 5, eucalyptus trees 30,000, willows 5000, wasp nests several, magpie nests several, egrets flying over rice paddocks above watery fields 167 mu, orioles chirping in the green shade of summer foliage 19 mu, lotus flowers 10,000, dogs 205, horse barns 100, buffaloes 185, ponds 90, rivers 3, sunset 1, laundresses 78, stars unidentified amount, moon one, moonlight 16.8 hectares. Statistics generated at 8 o’clock on the 15th day of the 8th month of the lunar calendar. The poem works on several semantic levels: on the surface, there is a mock statistic with random figures ranging from calculable entities such as villages, buildings or animals to the unfathomable loss of ecological balance. In the long run, this is both irrational and costly. On a second level, the poem compares unsustainable modern environmental engineering with the organic, sustainable approach of pre-modern rural communities who lived on and from the land they worked on. On a third level, the poem addresses the modern nation’s indifferent approach towards its landscapes from an aesthetic point of view, by quoting two lines from a famous shanshui poem by Tang poet Wang Wei, and concluding that what it newly delivers can be no match to what was destroyed in the process. The eerie mood of this strikingly unemotional list of destroyed things and lives is chilling, because it captures the zeitgeist of indifference towards everything that happens to stand in the way of short-term profit. On another occasion, Yu Jian wrote about Qiongzhu Temple situated in the hills overlooking Kunming. He imagined the 500 Buddhist Lohans or Arhats, who were all carved by an itinerant sculptor and his disciple some 150 years ago, weeping inconsolably as they contemplate the faceless modern city, which has fallen victim to the economic miracle. On a much deeper level than just the surface plane, Yu Jian’s poetic efforts to awaken his readers to the danger of cultural suicide resonate with widespread intellectual nostalgia for one’s hometown and the colorful, enchanted landscapes of ancient China.